


the heirloom of the heaviness we've known

by hypotheticalfanfic



Category: Captain America - All Media Types
Genre: Bucky has four sisters, Chronic Illness, F/F, F/M, Gen, Lesbian Character, Lesbian Character of Color, Mathematics, Misogyny, Multi, Period-Typical Homophobia, Period-Typical Racism, codebreaking, none of the Barnes sisters are currently living, polio, so I added the major character death tag, the Barnes sisters, this is making this sound darker than it really is
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-03-13
Updated: 2018-05-14
Packaged: 2019-03-30 18:17:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 4
Words: 8,781
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13957263
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hypotheticalfanfic/pseuds/hypotheticalfanfic
Summary: Bucky Barnes’s four amazing, terrifyingly brilliant sisters and the lives they led after his disappearance.





	1. though little on their own (Prologue)

On a blustery Saturday in April, 1915, Mr. and Mrs. James Henry Barnes welcomed their first child, a girl. They named her for Mr. James Henry Barnes’s dear departed mother, and went to bed with only a little disappointment that she wasn’t a boy. They’d been married a narrow six months earlier, just enough for propriety’s sake, and if they had hoped to pass little Clara Grace off as an early baby, her size didn’t help them in the lie. Clara Grace, who became CG almost without effort, was a solid 8 pounds, bigger than any other baby born in their building that year. Not only that, she was long, nearly a foot, and with a full head of hair on her, too. Mr. and Mrs. James Henry Barnes gave up trying to pass her off for an early birth and just watched her grow. And grow she did. CG was always tall, always broad, and always made things harder on them, every day of her life. 

Two years later, like clockwork, here came a bouncing baby boy, James Buchanan, named for a president Mr. Barnes had once idolized, although the precise reasons he’d done so were lost to the sands of time. Surely it wasn’t the bachelor president’s economic policy, nor his hesitant bumblings to try and keep the Union together in the face of an upcoming Civil War. Maybe it had just been the name, the sound of it. But while Mr. James Henry Barnes had many weak spaces, a weakness for the sound of things wasn’t necessarily one of them. It had been something, though, he was sure, that had given President Buchanan some glossy goodness he had longed for. Maybe the forgetting was why little James became Bucky before his second birthday, or maybe it was because he bucked like a bronco when a hand was raised to him.

After James came Florence Louise with two teeth and a cough already, whose grand-sounding name fast shortened to Flossie. Then Evelyn Rose with no trouble at all became Evie by the weekend, and tagging along like a Christmas surprise, little Rebecca Jean, who would show up unexpectedly (and often uninvited) for the rest of her life - she should have been Becca or Becky by rights, but she demanded to be Beck as soon as she could make the words, and no one who didn’t want a sock in the nose argued with Beck for too long. That none of their children used their given names was something of a surprise. Mrs. James Henry Barnes (whose name, once upon a time, had been Martha Klein) didn’t seem to mind. Beck and Evie and Flossie and Bucky and CG were easier to call for in a crowd than Rebecca and Evelyn and Florence and James and Clara. Why, they knew three little girls around CG’s age with Clara in their name somewhere, and while she took some pride in being fashionable, it rankled Mrs. James Henry Barnes to hear it bandied about to girls who’d never have the struggles her girls would, who’d never grow up with a part of their heart missing because of how their mother’d married. Of course, she could have been wrong - Jewish women didn’t often advertise, especially when they married out - but she ached to give her girls a whole heart. And, it should be mentioned, it rankled Mr. James Henry Barnes something awful to hear his son called something other than James. 

Of course, lots of things rankled Mr. James Henry Barnes about his children, and his son in particular. Like there only being one of him, and him being so damned odd, and taking up with that skinny Catholic from down the alley, the one who always seemed about half-dead and kept getting Bucky into fights. Like how his son played football like breathing but didn’t give a goddamn about it, like how he chased skirts just enough to be believable, just enough to seem a little dangerous, but no girl went with him twice with that same hopeful expression. It was like the second time Bucky took them out, they were pretty damned sure nothing untoward was going to happen, and Mr. James Henry Barnes never could put a finger on why that bothered him so much. But it did. It rankled, like a war wound or a bad tooth. The hooch helped, with that and with other problems. He’d had friends on the the _Maine_ , including a boy from the old neighborhood, the boy who in his own childhood he’d clung to as tightly as his son seemed to cling to that Rogers kid. Nightmares stuck to him like old clothes, and when he swam up out of them each night it felt like drowning, like his friend must have felt, like no air could get to him and no light could see him and no end was in sight except the one he was most scared of. 

This isn’t a story about him, though, nor about Bucky Barnes, nor even about Mrs. James Henry Barnes. This is a story about Clara Grace, and Florence Louise, and Evelyn Rose, and Rebecca Jean. It’s a story, too, about a family with a hole torn out of them, with pain etched around edges of dubious affection even before a mountain pass and a train took away too much of it. It’s a story about heirlooms and legacy and memory. But for now, let’s start with CG Barnes, the scourge of every asshole she ever met.


	2. Clara Grace Barnes, 04/03/1915-11/19/1982

She was too tall, was the problem. Pretty, even as a baby, sweet face like a little angel (big angel, her father might have muttered when he was in his cups). A deep, sticky giggle that would turn into a rich, throaty laugh. Her height could have made her slump, turn in on herself, and had she been born just a bit later it might have succeeded. But lucky duck, she was born at just the right time to hit the Garbo craze. When she grew into it, she was a stunner. Tall, with wide shoulders and narrow hips, CG emerged as something of a fashion plate, finding that special haven of clothes just right for her on every shelf in New York.

But she wasn’t there yet. Now she was still a gangly brunette with a strong jaw, and that meant she got a mean right hook, too, and pretty damn quickly. She could have slumped, but she didn’t. She stood straight and strong, leaned in on any bully who dared, pushed with one long arm and one big hand, and more often than not got away without actually having to punch. When she couldn’t, well, growing up with her particular pops meant she knew a thing or two about fighting dirty. Not that he hit her, necessarily, not when Bucky was there to pull him away, not when her ma wouldn’t stand for it. But CG wasn’t stupid. A little mean, a little too slow on the uptake about acting like everybody else, but not stupid, never that. 

She got in a big scrap with the Morris brothers down the alley, and when she dragged herself back home Bucky cried. Her ma cried. Pops, eyes dry, told her she’d probably earned it. The next time the Morris boys jumped her, she kicked one so hard he never quite walked right again, and bit the other one’s right ear half off. When she came back from that one, Pops didn’t look proud, but he didn’t glare at her either. So she practiced, and she learned, and soon enough only people who didn’t know her dared look at her sideways. A girl who knew real soon that she liked girls had to do what needed to be done, and when she saw in her baby brother (only brother, the only one) that same glint of difference, she taught him, too. 

“Buck, you dope, don’t tuck your thumb in,” she adjusted his hand for what felt like the hundredth time. “You’ll snap it, if you hit a bone.”

He sniffed, lowered his eyelids, tucked his chin up. She could see, clear as day, how beautiful he was going to be when he grew up, and how easily he’d be able to use it in a way she never would. “Yeah, yeah.”

The solid pop to his chin shook that smirk off his face, and the left hook to his cheek wiped him of that pretty glazed look. She hadn’t hit to hurt him, just surprise him into reacting, and it didn’t bode well that his reaction was to drop to the floor and curl up. 

“No, baby, you can’t do that.” She pulled him up with one hand (he was so skinny, she needed to hide more of Ma’s laundry money this week, get some bread in him). “You can’t drop, they’ll just kick you. Gotta plant your feet and never let ‘em knock you down.”

He met her eyes, and his real face showed through: pretty, yes, but sharper than people thought, and with a cruel streak he didn’t want anyone to see, all hidden under a big heart he didn’t want anyone to know about either. Her baby brother, the only brother she’d ever have, and he hid everything seven layers deep and she had to protect him. This time he planted his feet good, put up his dukes, and she got a jab to his ribs but he blocked the next two swings and nailed her right in the chin. His hand was held just right. 

“Oh, shit, CG, I’m sorry!” All the strength drained out of his face, and she had to praise him to high heaven to get him to try again. When he brought home the skinny Catholic kid from up the lane, the one who was sick all the time, she sighed.

“Bucky throws a mean punch,” the skinny kid said, nursed a bruise on one cheekbone. “Got those pricks off me quick as anything.”

She leveled a look at the kid. Steve, Bucky’d called him, an ease to his voice CG didn’t miss. “He had to learn fast. You should, too.”

“Think he’d teach me?”

“If you wanna learn the wrong way, Stevie, I’m happy to.” Her brother, that lazy cat look on his face, and _oh_. She saw it now, and felt a chill at her core. “CG’s the best there is, you oughta beg her for a lesson.”

He didn’t beg, but she gave the lesson anyway, and a few more. Over the years, Stevie got to be just another kid in her orbit, one she taught to throw a punch and take one, taught to fight dirty and run like hell. Only Stevie couldn’t really run, and got real good at taking beatings and nowhere near handing one out. He could bite and kick like a mule, though, and wasn’t ashamed to like Bucky was sometimes. They liked each other, CG and Steve, didn’t talk much. She’d tap one of his sharp elbows or hook her ankle around his, or he’d touch two fingers to a bruise by her ear. He never tried anything either, which she appreciated. She didn’t know if he could tell about her, or if he was just being polite, but the result was the same. 

Sometimes they went dancing, brought Evie with them a time or two. Met a gaggle of friends and spent the night just moving, not fighting. When she kissed a girl for the first time (Nancy MacKenzie, and their fathers would have killed them a hundred times over if they’d known), Stevie seemed to just know it, and offered to bring Nancy as his date a few times. Bucky would bring whatever girl he was dangling along, she’d bring one or the other of the Fitz twins, and, well. It was nice. Real nice. Nancy married one of the Fitzes, even, so it all worked out just fine. 

Took a few years, but Bucky Barnes got a reputation for a punch as good as any man’s, and nearly as good as his big sister’s. She taught him to kick, too, and bite, and use whatever he could grab. “People who wanna kill you aren’t gonna give you an inch, Buck. You gotta nail ‘em hard and get away as fast as you can.” Stevie took that lesson to heart, that and a few others, and she watched with pride in her eyes the first time he nailed a bigot right in the balls. She could have hugged him, she was so proud.

////

Some years later, CG met a girl in a speakeasy. Her baby brother was shipping out next week, leaving them all behind, and she was so afraid. This place’s bathtub gin wasn’t the best but it hadn’t killed or blinded anybody yet, and besides the man out front knew her (knew Bucky). The girl was stout, dark eyes and hair, skin light enough she could probably pass if she tried. 

“Daisy.” The girl held out one soft hand. CG took it, felt a shock of shame about the scars and calluses on her own.

“CG. Well, Clara, but only my Ma and Da call me that and you,” she let a little leer trail over her face, “ain’t either of them.”

“I sure am not, kitten.” Daisy’s grin was wicked, her eyes are sparkling, and CG felt like the ground got pulled out from under. 

They moved in together the week after Bucky left, just before Stevie announced that he was headed off, too. He came over to their place, a shabby one-room on the sixth floor of a building that by all rights ought to be condemned. “They took you?” CG could have punched herself, it sounded so mean, but she could name half a hundred reasons the Army wouldn’t and shouldn’t take skinny Steve Rogers. 

“Special program,” he said, not even seeming to have heard the disbelief. “I gotta earn my place, but I think I can do it.” He met her eyes. “I gotta try, CG. I can’t leave him over there alone, and I can’t sit here while good men die. I gotta do my part.”

“Fair enough,” she said, and tangled one hand with Daisy’s. “You write us, you hear? And if you bump into my baby brother, slap him upside his head. I’m sure he deserves it for something or other.”

“He always does,” Steve said with that thousand-watt smile, and that was the last time she ever saw him. He wrote a couple times, but just like Bucky had, stopped once he went overseas. She worried for him, worried for Bucky, worried and worried whenever Daisy wasn’t there to kiss her into oblivion. 

Daisy put around that she had a Spanish grandmother, and although that wouldn’t have fooled anyone for a minute who didn’t want to be fooled, it worked fine. CG got a job in a diner, brought home scraps of meat and bread ends and anything they were gonna throw out. Daisy cleaned houses some, and picked up shifts at a scrap metal place, and took in laundry until it started to hurt her hands. When CG got her a pad of paper and three nice pencils for their first Christmas, Daisy cried for an hour.

“Baby, I’m sorry, I thought—“

“No, it’s perfect, you’re perfect.” Daisy kissed her soundly. “You don’t gotta apologize to me, not for anything.” CG smiled, fiddled with the dark red lipstick Daisy’d wrapped up so nice, and asked if her lover would draw her. They got a little distracted, and the portrait wasn’t anything they could ever show to anyone, but it made CG’s heart feel so light.

////

Daisy, miracle of miracles, got a steady job. She drew Tijuana bibles, those dirty comics. They sold for a quarter apiece and she made nearly five cents for each. The guy who sold ‘em was sweet on her, which was why she got a good price, although CG worried that any day now he’d try to collect on some debt. Daisy wasn’t worried; she never really worried about anything. Her books were funny - she drew dirty jokes, lots of tall brunettes getting dressed and undressed, smirking and sassing. CG blushed when she saw those: her own dark arched brows, the shape of her chin, good as a declaration to anyone who cared to look. Daisy drew queer stuff, too, Superman biting pillows for Joe Louis, that kind of thing, but those didn’t sell as well and she was lucky to turn a profit on them. She couldn’t tell anyone, of course, but she made a living. “One of these days,” she said often enough, “I’m gonna write my own story, maybe for Action Comics.”

“A Superman story?” CG pressed a kiss to her lover’s bare shoulder. “You’d write a good one. Make him punch the Klan some more or somethin’.”

“Nah, not Superman. Something about a normal guy, a sweet guy, gets turned into a hero. Punches some Nazis.”

CG hummed. “I’d read those. Little guy gets big.”

“Do a patriotic angle, give him a kid sidekick, yeah.” Daisy trailed two fingers down CG’s neck. “Maybe a sexy girl friend. It’d sell real good, don’t you think, baby?”

“Like bagels, doll. Make us millionaires.”

The book did sell real well, amazingly well. Course Daisy couldn’t put her name on it, had to pay half what she made to the guys who owned the book. But they knew, and anyone who’d read Daisy’s dirty books (she still wrote them, not gonna give up a good gig) might have recognized the broad-shouldered WAC with the mean right hook. CG couldn’t read them, not once she saw Stevie’s big dumb nose on the hero’s face, not once she saw the way the kid’s hair curled just so over his forehead. But she bought every one, kept ‘em in a box in their room. 

She waitressed some, CG did, but she was awful at it. Lucked into a substitute teaching job, found out that she was real good at languages. Daisy’s cash put her through school, and she landed a sweet and steady job at a Catholic school in their neighborhood teaching French and penmanship. She liked it just fine, liked the kids, liked that she had a reason to be unmarried (they didn’t need to know she wasn’t Catholic, she’d spent long enough around the Rogers kid and his saintly mom to pick up what was necessary), liked that no one looked twice at her in her sensible, boring skirt suits. 

Liked, too, the money, liked taking Daisy to the queer bars and swinging her on the dance floor. They weren’t either of them the pants type, but when they went out it was important to dress the part. Daisy’d dress like a real swell dame, do her eye makeup just so, and she’d slick a dark red onto CG’s full lips, help her tie her tie. They looked real sharp, and every once in a while CG saw them in a mirror, thought for just a second that they might be able to trick some preacher — but Daisy would hate that, lying to a preacher, so she shoveled it back away. Danced with Daisy and played her part, and when they stumbled home she’d call her “wife” and make love to her and do the dishes, all the things she’d do till death did them part even if they couldn’t say the words.

/////

The 60s and 70s passed them by, and Daisy got shouldered out of her book - it had sold well, always, but she’d been asked to stop submitting work, and they hadn’t ever put her name on it anyway. Tijuana bibles had gone way out of style, and she didn’t have anything to put in a portfolio. She got another job, typing up memos for an ad man, and CG hated seeing her come home cramped up and skittish. “They don’t try anything, baby,” Daisy would reassure her. “I’m passing there, they wouldn’t dare do more than touch a little. Plus I put it around I’m Catholic, so they know I wouldn’t get rid of any problem they might give me. Helps some.” 

“Oh, baby,” she buried her head in Daisy’s shoulder, “please quit, please. I can make rent a few months while you look, please.”

“It’s interesting work, CG, I’m learning a lot.” Daisy kissed her, soft and sweet. “I think I might be able to angle into an illustrating job, you know, in a month or two. One of ‘em already saw some sketches, thought they were real good.”

“They think you’re a Catholic girl with Spanish blood who draws women better than anyone on their staff, huh?” CG smiled. “You amaze me, baby.”

Took her three months, but she got in. Her first campaign was for shoe polish, and CG framed a print of it, and Daisy cried, just a little, when she came home to see it hung on their shabby apartment wall. CG hung every campaign Daisy worked on, and when Daisy got promoted from junior illustrator, they moved to a two-room third-floor walkup with a little balcony. CG kept tomatoes out there, and Daisy worked on better campaigns. CG kept teaching, changed schools once or twice. They got a cat, then another one showed up of its own free will. They moved again, a smaller place but close enough for CG to walk to work, and besides it had a doorman. They felt like real swells every time Manuel opened the door for them, and felt a little better knowing someone was standing between them and the world.

They didn’t talk about Bucky. Somewhere or other she had a flag and some medals and a letter she hadn’t ever read, from Steve. When she’d seen that first newsreel, she hadn’t recognized him at first. Then he turned profile and there was that nose, the one she’d seen bruised and nearly broken more times than she could count, and she laughed aloud. When he found her brother, she wept at that one. And when Bucky — whatever had happened, he’d written her a letter, and she’d never opened it and never would. Nothing he would say would matter. Wouldn’t bring back her baby brother. And then Steve died, too, and CG didn’t open that letter, either. Daisy knew where the box was, knew well enough not to bring it up. Whenever they moved into a new place, the box got tucked away somewhere CG wouldn’t have to see it, and they went on as always.

////

Daisy died in 1979, still wicked, pinching CG’s ass when no one was looking. Pneumonia, bad one, got into her lungs and wouldn’t let her go. “All that smoke at the agency,” Daisy’d mused. “Those assholes.”

“You won them all those awards, and that’s what they give you, huh?” CG’d smiled, just a little, at Daisy’s choked laugh.

“Well, you know. They gave me a watch, too, and an envelope with a hundred dollars.” 

“Yeah, we went to dinner on that, I remember. That weird fish shit you like.” At that Daisy had laughed again, weaker, and CG had kept talking, just nonsense stuff, until she heard Daisy’s breathing slow, felt her grip weaken. “You were the light of my life, baby.” 

Evie and Beck came to the funeral, brought their kids. They’d known what Daisy was to her, hadn’t exactly had them over for cards each week but hadn’t shunned them either. All their queer friends came, too, even the one guy from the agency who’d figured out who and what Daisy was over a decade ago. Some cousin of someone sang a few hymns. The pastor gave some vague sermon about sin and degradation, and CG just let it flow around her. 

That wasn’t Daisy in the coffin. It was some shell, and Daisy was in a better world, where she’d had her name on her books, where they’d been married, where they’d lived in nicer places and had nicer things and fought less, where she hadn’t had to do the things they’d had to do to make it through. That was what mattered, and CG could sit through vile shaming if it meant she could believe in where Daisy deserved to be.

When CG got home, to that same building where Manuel used to be their doorman and now it was a skinny white kid named Toby, she saw that portrait, from that first Christmas. A dark red lip print on one corner, Daisy’s signature style, her own youthful body splayed out just this side of filthy. Every line of it was engraved in her mind, and she missed Daisy so much. She made it another three years before the cancer that was already there ate her through, and if one of her grand-nieces found that sketch and freaked out, sold it online, well. It was a Daisy Fuentes (Daisy Washington, she would have corrected them) original, and the box of mint comics, too, and all those framed ads: CG hadn’t realized Daisy was famous. Didn’t know some enterprising grad student had written up paper after paper about the similar art in some early superhero comics and some dirty pictures and some well-known ad campaigns. Daisy got famous after all, got her name on her books - well, half her name, anyway. CG got famous, too, just a bit. “Longtime companion,” they called her in those papers, and in the news articles, and then when the Internet got big and gay kids all over the world got wind about Daisy. 

If there was an afterlife, CG and Daisy were probably laughing it up right up to the second Steve Rogers came out of the ice. Or maybe the moment Bucky Barnes reappeared, or maybe when they disappeared again. Her idiot baby brother and that skinny kid from down the street, just being stupid together. It’d have made CG laugh till she fell, and if sometimes Bucky felt the need for someone to slap him upside the head, well. There were worse legacies.


	3. Florence Louise Barnes, 01/16/1919-04/07/1939

She wasn’t like the Rogers kid, she’d insist to anyone who asked. Not sick with every damned thing the Lord ever thought up, no, just the two. That cough that started when she was a baby and never let up, and then the polio. Just the two things. She’d sneered at Stevie when they’d first met, that first time her big brother brought the skinny Irish kid over for a dinner that would just barely feed them all. The kid had, she guessed, sought to commiserate over being sick. “Well, I can see colors and I ain’t got nothin’ wrong with my heart, so I figure I can beat the pants off you.” She’d laughed at him, her meanest laugh, the one that made Evie and Beck cry every time.

He didn’t cry, which disappointed her. He’d looked shocked, though, like she’d kicked him in the fork of his legs, and CG had rolled her eyes and pulled him away to start teaching him how to punch. That worked well enough. Flossie coughed, a deep rattle, over and over, until she groped her way over to a chair. Wrote the cough in her journal like that quack had said to do. “What triggered this attack, doc?” she muttered to herself. “Some snotty little shit asking me about asthma cigarettes.” She stabbed the paper with her pencil, tore a neat perfect round hole. Slammed the book shut. Coughed some more. Went back to bed. Bucky growled out a lecture, “be nice to my friend, Floss,” that night, but she pretended to be asleep, and though he could absolutely tell, he let it slide. Buck was good that way. 

Took a few weeks for the Rogers kid to get over that snap, and the next time he talked to Flossie he picked a fight with her about the Odyssey - the boys were reading it in school and Bucky’d made her read it aloud to him (lazy big brother, never would do his own work unless it was something with electricity in it), and the Rogers kid argued with her for a solid hour about Odysseus and whether Penelope was ever gonna marry one of those suitors or not. When Ma came in to holler at them for hollering, they shared a grin.

Even as a baby, she’d been contrary and cross. CG was only four when she came along, but if Flossie asked, she’d tell her that she came out scrawny, two teeth, and mean as a snake. The cough came real soon after she arrived, and it hung over her bed even before she lost what little freedom her legs had given her. The cough didn’t make her snappish or sharp, but it didn’t help, either. Flossie just plain didn’t get on well with most people - not because she wasn’t nice, not that, not exactly. She was nice enough when she wanted to be. But she didn’t want to be, not most of the time, ‘cause she’d read all the books with sick girls in them and they were always nice, always whimpering sweet angels, always got wept over when they faded out in the last third of the book. She hated them, hated that. She’d rather die mean and sharp and real, not an angel, just a person.

///

She liked Stevie just fine, more than CG did, almost as much as Bucky did. He liked her, too, she could tell, once he realized she was just as sharp-elbowed and cranky as he was. Adults all saw Steve as the same kind of sickly angel they wanted to see her as, and they rankled under it, the both of them. One time Pops made some offhand remark about that Rogers kid always hanging around, the implication being he wouldn’t be there if he wasn’t expecting something in return. Something more, he meant, than the dinners and Bucky’s implied protection. He looked right at her when he said it, like he’d put some awful gloss over top of her and Stevie laughing it up over something stupid, their fair heads bent over a book, the way Steve never treated her different after the polio hit. She snarled inside, kept her thin face perfectly blank, and acted like she didn’t understand. 

She wasn’t stupid, but Pops thought so, and if it made things easier - well, she was learning to let people assume things sometimes. Steve was real good at that, even as she could see how it rankled him to be treated like a weakling, like an idiot, like a fairy. He’d smile and nod and take it, and then when he walked away his whole posture would change into the vicious little scrapper she loved like a brother. Steve turned into an alley fighter and a bully basher, and Flossie got smart. Real smart, scary smart. She read anything she could find, and once her legs went dead she wrote out lists of books and sent her brother out to get them. Steve’d come, too, bring the one book she’d forgotten almost every time. 

When she started writing, just dumb little stories about the robots and spaceships Bucky would go on and on about, Steve crowed over them. Made her send them off to _Astounding Stories_. Bucky helped her pick a pen name, something vague enough that the suits would read it as a boy’s name, and Steve hand-delivered the first clutch of stories to the postman for her. She didn’t make much, but it was something. Contributed to the household. Plus she got to hear Steve read that first story, the one about the robot mailman, out loud to Bucky, who laughed until he fell out of the chair at the funny parts. Bucky clapped at the exciting parts, too, and gave Flossie a hug after, and she felt stronger than she had even before she’d gotten sick. 

Stories poured out after that, some bad - just variations on what the magazines looked for, busty blond women and dashing heroes - but some were, she thought, pretty good. The funny ones, like the robot mailman one and its sequel, sold pretty well, so she churned out a few more of those. Then Bucky brought her a bag with three books in it: _The Blazing World_ , _Herland_ , and a tied-together beat-to-hell copy of _Frankenstein_. She’d read the last, of course, but the other two were revelations. _Blazing World_ in particular kicked her in the ass, and the next stories she wrote were thinly veiled retreads of it. They didn’t sell well. It didn’t matter. She didn’t write another story with a man in the lead. Not one.

Some of her heroines were CG, tall and brash and quick with a fist. Some were Beck, all nosy pushy energy and getting into situations she hadn’t thought through. Some were even Evie, sweet brilliant Evie. Those ones always used math to save the day, and she split the proceeds with their model, who’d had to write the math parts out because no one knew numbers like Evie. Sometimes Steve or Bucky would show up, supporting characters, holding a big gun or wearing a disguise, piloting the ship while the heroine saved a life in the back. She liked those stories, where they were all together. Liked putting in little in-jokes about Martinelli’s grocery, or about that badly chosen orange tie Bucky’d been so proud of. She made enough to pay for Beck to keep going to school, and helped out some with Evie’s gear for that out-of-state job. She helped, and her Da never knew, and that alone was worth it all.

///

Over time the magazine men figured it out. They weren’t stupid, after all, and the first few heroines got by without much mention but a tipping point was reached and she received a letter at the box she’d bought just for them. Beck brought it to her. It asked, baldly and without pretense, that she present herself at the office of the publisher for a talk about the content of her work. This editorial meeting, the letter said, was in deference to the quality of her work and the long-standing relationship they had shared.

A rolling chair, then. She didn’t have one - hadn’t ever even seen one in life, only in papers. She didn’t know anyone who would have one, but Beck did. Beck had always been the type of person who just knew people, and asked only that Flossie never ask her questions about where she got it. One of the Fitzes - not the one sweet on CG, the other one - helped carry her down their steps, helped get her settled in the chair. Oh, how she hated this. It was stiff and heavy, and she had to have Beck push her, and she’d had to dress like a respectable lady of not quite nineteen. She had to wave her hair and scrounge up a hat, and do the things she hadn’t done in years, all so some stupid old men could condescend to her and take away her job.

They did condescend, but less than she’d expected. If anything, the chair helped some, made them think she was wealthier than they’d thought. Chairs were expensive, after all, and Beck was gorgeous, and Flossie knew her own face well enough to know that she could smile her way through this if, at the end of it, she got to keep writing. If they took this name away, she’d use a different one. No one could take the stories away, and that thought held her through negotiations that ended with her pay per story cut by a third. Rage flared up, of course, but Beck’s steady hand at her back and her own knowledge (they can’t take away the stories, they can’t do that) kept her breathing. Their magazine, she pointedly did not say, needed the extra nickels with how low its circulation had gotten. She gracefully mentioned the other rags still coming out every week, how the biweekly schedule made it hard to keep up the pace, and was rewarded with panicked faces.

“Of course, Miss Barnes, we do love your stories,” said one with beady eyes behind thick glasses. He was sweating, wiping it away with a white handkerchief finer than the one in Flossie’s own hand, and she hated him. “It’s nothing to do with the quality of your work. This is a pay grade issue, my dear.”

She nodded, acquiesced, made no more noise. Beck rolled her home, called the Fitz twin (not the one who’d carried her down, the other one), rolled the chair away to the mysterious benefactor Flossie was never to ask about. That night Flossie felt the cough get stronger, stronger than it had ever been, and some animal instinct pushed up and out of her. She wrote a story every other day now, fast and furious, and only sent half of them to the magazine. The pay cut hurt, but she was storing up for something. Wasn’t sure what, but something.

///

That summer, that last summer, Flossie was so excited. Six or seven new adventure magazines were publishing, and she’d gotten word through the grapevine that her stories, especially her newest serial about the Martian woman trying to solve a murder, were in high demand. That box of extra stories under her bed, this was what they’d been for. She had trouble sleeping, not just because of the excitement, but the cough. It had never gone away, never settled back into manageable. It just got worse. Her breathing got labored. Her hands were numb half the time and she had to have Beck write the words out for her now; when they weren’t numb they shook, and sometimes both at once. Breathing got harder and harder, and at night she could barely move, she coughed so hard. “It’ll be better in the fall,” she wheezed to anyone who looked concerned. It was always better in the fall. This was a bad summer, was all. 

Just after Steve’s birthday, after he’d laughed through an argument with her about how the Martian lady shouldn’t marry her Earthling beau, she finished one last story. It was about a girl who grew up inside a robot - someone had taken her mind and put it in a metal shell, and she would live forever. It was slight, a little silly, but it was finished. Beck kissed her forehead, pressed back her hair, left her to bed. She stared at the ceiling, felt her lungs rattle and creak. She missed Bucky. Hoped he’d wake up early to grab one of the new magazines, the one she’d sent a new serial to. He’d know it was hers, always did. Had helped her with the name. Had laughed at the funny parts. She fell asleep, fitfully but finally, dreaming about her big brother laughing, and then that was that. 

Beck found her. The magazine published the last two Louis Buchanan stories that week. The Martian lady solved the murder, finally ate an American hot dog, and married the sweet, shy Earthling scientist with thick brown hair. The robot mailman popped up in a long-delayed finale, saving the day with his literal mind and faulty programming as he had in that very first story. And somewhere in the future, someone published a few Louis Buchanan stories in a well-received anthology, and the son of one of the magazine’s publishers found old letters, and Florence Louise Barnes got added to every “early feminist sci-fi” list for a few years. Not a bad way to go into whatever endless void existed out in the stars, all things considered.


	4. Evelyn Rose (Barnes) Esposito - 05/08/1921-06/30/1990

Numbers were the only things that always made sense. They didn’t change, and Evie clung to them. She wasn’t tough like CG or blond like Flossie or beautiful like Beck, but she was smart. They all said so. Maybe not with everything - her sewing was abysmal, she was a horrid cook, and if her hair ever looked neat it was because Beck did it for her. But numbers, and anything to do with them, she could do like breathing. Little girl Evie, helping Bucky through his homework, just knowing the answers without quite knowing why. Young Evie, walking with Steve and Bucky to get Flossie’s books from the library, losing herself in dusty old tomes in the back of the stacks. Little lady Evie, doing numbers in her head for fun because paper was expensive but thinking was free.

Ma had put her to work on the books for the laundry as soon as she could prove it would work, and she’d earned some extra helping with accounts for the greengrocer down the alley. A couple other places, too, she had interested in her, especially with how tight money was getting these days. Da had muttered a bit, about the ease with numbers being unnatural, but had kept his mouth shut when the money’d started coming in. Even in the worst of the lean years, the Barnes family did okay, not least because Evie had numbers running in her head and behind her eyes all the time. A line of credit at a grocer’s and another with the milkman (his gambling made profit real hard to come by, but Evie managed better than he ever had on his own) helped, too.

She’d had friends, sort of, in school: girls she’d sat with, the occasional boy who’d palled around with her for Beck’s sake, Bucky and Steve. She’d had the make-work jobs keeping books, and had helped with the laundry when Ma asked, and snuck off to the college to listen in on lectures when she couldn’t stand the walls anymore. Technically speaking she wasn’t allowed to be there, but Bucky and Steve pulled strings, and no one could say no to Bucky’s wide smile or Steve’s clear eyes.

The job, the big job, it happened because she made a friend. Or, well, a man found her sitting with Bucky and Steve on the college’s green lawn playing with one of their math books, pulling apart equations to put them back together in more interesting ways, and nodded once, pursed his lips, gave her a card. Ma had panicked, had thought she was being recruited for a white slavery ring (Evie had looked very confused at that, as had Beck, and Ma had shut her mouth with a click). But the card was for a private girls’ school in Virginia. Bucky’d asked around, made sure it was a real place, told her all he’d heard about it.

“Too expensive,” Da had said immediately. He hadn’t even looked at the card, just heard “private school” and shut them out. Evie cried for a day and a half, then took Beck with her to the saloon. 

"May we use your telephone?” Evie had asked, face alight with youthful charm. It was a careful look, one she had practiced, and it worked as it almost always did. The woman who answered the phone gave them numbers - yearly cost, minus scholarship money she could apply for, minus, too, the stipend she would get for working at the school as a junior instructor. It was still a steep sum, and Evie ended the call with tears in her eyes again.

“How much?” Flossie was in bed, worn blankets pulled up over her wasted legs. Evie told her the number, and Flossie laughed. “Honey, I’ve got you.” Beck was the go-between, and with Flossie’s stories (the ones they weren’t supposed to tell Da about) and Bucky’s mechanic money (the half he sent to them) and Ma’s silent careful allotment of a part of the laundry money, they could do it. The first year, paid in full, and Evie hugged them and wept as she boarded a train, wept and wept and only about half of it was sadness at leaving. The rest was, well, relief, or something like it. 

\---

As a child she had been odd, that funny-turned Barnes girl, would have been cute if she’d make an effort, too smart for her own good. When she stepped off the train at Arlington, though, she was swept into a flood of women who were the same. Smart, too smart, and whip-cracking and terrifying, these women with more money and more training. Evie had a roommate, Charlotte, who was from a little further south, and the work was easy, nothing strenuous, just teaching younger girls how beautiful mathematics could be, how numbers were a language all their own, how fun it could all become if they just let it. 

Then the war came.

It was a sticky summer, and the Army men sweated like horses, and the women were seated shoulder-to-shoulder on long benches in one of the big buildings. “Those of you with mathematics backgrounds, please stay behind,” the rest dismissed. Evie felt her heart leap in her chest. A big barrel of a man with a big beard and a bigger voice explained, in clear language as if he thought they might misunderstand, what was going to happen now.

Charlotte, who had been a biology assistant, was sent home, and so Evie returned to a room with three other women she didn’t know well, and they stayed up too late with coffee and books of cryptography and Japanese dictionaries. There wasn’t time, no time at all, and when Evie finally passed out at night she could feel the letters and numbers she’d stared at all day swarm up and down her skin, float behind her eyelids. She dreamed in code. 

Codebreaking was boring and difficult most days. The girls got used to the senders, gave some of them nicknames (Macaroni for the one whose keywords were food-based, Rainbow for the one who used color words, etc.). Argued over interpretations. They worked and worked and worked, and a third of her pay went home in a brown envelope with a careful vague letter about how nice it was to be helping out the war effort in some tiny little way, and Evie was happy. The uncomplicated kind of happy. Her days were long and quiet and stressful and full of numbers, full of whispers, full of the specific tension that fills a room when it’s stuffed with people thinking very hard. Her nights started with a few drinks and, most of the time, ended with falling asleep the second her head hit the pillow back at the dorm.

Then a letter comes for her, about Bucky, and the newspapers crow over Steve, and she hid in the work. Let numbers and patterns cover her eyes and ears and fill her brain until she barely remembered her own name. Let her dreams fill with conversations between Japanese radio operators about half-remembered poetry from childhood, let it all crowd out what was happening out there beyond the green lawn. And then Bucky was safe, and she got a shaky letter from him, and Steve was suddenly someone very important, and she got reams of drawings from him, and then. A train, and a plane; it felt right that they both fell, having risen so high, like something out of Homer. And Evie sunk back into the work, didn’t go home, didn’t socialize much anymore. She just worked, every second she wasn’t asleep, and even in her sleep she puzzled out codes that stymied her, and by the time the war was over she’d mostly forgotten there was even anything happening out there. 

\---

Going home hurt. She was back in Brooklyn, back in an apartment where no one talked about anything that meant anything, and her brain sort of short-circuited. She went a little mad for a time. Ran over to CG’s place, the one she shared with her wife, and hid in their big comfy couch until the tears stopped. Ran to any bar she could find and drank until her brain shut up and let her go to sleep. Ran to the college, where she could sit in a room with a lecturer going over math she’d mastered years ago, just numbly letting the waves of the speech push her around a little. 

The dark-haired man sat next to her the fourth day in a row, and she finally looked at him. “What?” Her voice, she knew, was too abrasive; she’d forgotten how to be the quiet type.

“You mind if I sit here?” He had a broad face, friendly, and darker skin than most of the rest of the room. Big square jaw and thick brows and a big nose, and she liked him immediately. 

“Free enough country,” and she snorted a little, it was something Steve would have said, and then she frowned, because Steve was dead, and then the man was holding out one heavy hand to her. 

“I’m Pete. Esposito.” His voice was nice, rough and rich, heavy accent on his own last name. He didn’t lean into her space, didn’t push, just held out his hand like it was the most natural thing in the world.

“Evie Barnes.” They shook hands, and he smiled at her again. Loaned her a pencil the next day. Kept sitting next to her, kept smiling.

Pete wasn’t near as good with numbers as she was, but he wasn’t a slouch, either. He’d been a radio operator during the war, and told her all about some of the neat things the Americans and Brits had done for their codes. He told her about his sisters, two of them, and she told him about her brother, and her three sisters, and soon enough he was coming by for Sunday supper. Ma liked him. Da hated him. Beck smirked and said nothing.

They went for coffee, for a malted, to the flicks. They walked around the lawns of the college and he never pushed her to shut up or stop acting smart, and so when he asked if he could kiss her, she thought about it for a minute. “If not,” he said, one hand in his thick hair, “that’s fine, Evie, I don’t wanna—“ He was interrupted by her lips on his.

\---

They got married in spring 1946. Da was near enough sober, and Ma cried, and CG brought Daisy (Evie hugged them both long and hard and nearly wept when Pete shook both their hands and smiled), and Beck was her maid of honor. The reception was half Army buddies of Pete’s and half the Barnes clan, but Evie had managed to track down some of the girls from the SIS. They had married, some, and brought their men, and some had babies, and they clustered together and wept a little at seeing each other. Evie and Pete went to the ocean for their honeymoon, and came back to Brooklyn. 

Beck left the country and came back with a baby. Pete finished up school and started selling real estate. Evie landed a funny little part-time job making brain teaser puzzles to put in newspapers; then a textbook company hired her to help write math books. She laughed a little, putting names of people and places she’d grown up with as examples: If Mr. Martinelli, the grocer, sells 17 oranges at a 30% markup…

Jimmy came along two years into their marriage, then every two years after that came another: Sarah Louise, then the twins Tony and Bea, then little Steve, and lollygagging as she always would, their last, Laura. Pete made big pots of pasta on nights Evie had to finish an assignment, and in 1970 she filled out a pamphlet about continuing education, got a good scholarship. He owned the real estate company now, and Evie breezed through a college degree, then a master’s. The kids flourished. Pete retired. He had a heart attack in 1979, then another in 1980. The third, the next year, took him, and Evie sold the house and moved into Bea’s big ranch house stuffed with kids and books and half-dead potted plants. She tutored her grandkids in calculus and laughed when they acted surprised.

She died in the hospital in 1990, a stupid fall turned into pneumonia, the silliest thing. She died calm, a little hazy, surrounded by Beck and Augusta, by six children and thirteen grandchildren, by a nurse who reminded her so much of her old roommate from Arlington Hall. She died, and it was all right. She died, and it was a good life. She made a difference, she did some good, and there is nothing more she could have asked for, not in the whole world.

**Author's Note:**

> title from "Heirloom" by Sleeping at Last
>
>> You remind me of who I could have been,  
> Had I been stronger and braver way back then.  
> A million choices, though little on their own,  
> Became the heirloom of the heaviness we’ve known.
>> 
>> You are so much more than your father’s son.  
> You are so much more than the wars you’ve won.


End file.
